Grand & Pitt

On one level, my new paranormal novella
Horn Gate exists as a racy comic book written by a
character in another one of my books.

The thing is, I'm nearly finished with a new
comedic contemporary romance called
Bad Idea about a comic book artist and a creature FX
designer. As the book came together, I realized that my main
character was channeling his anxiety and frustration into a racy
comic that would upend his life. This comic ended up becoming a
turning point for him emotionally and professionally and at the
urging of one of my betas I decided that I would write the
comic-within-the-book as a separate novella.

At the time, I had no idea that
Scratch #1 would become
Horn Gate. My reclusive comic book artist from
Bad Idea has issues about his
appearance and sexuality…not closeted exactly, but he lives a
cautious life completely under the gaydar. It made sense then that
the "very graphic novel" he writes would need to be provocative and
weird and slightly deranged. My comic book artist needed to take
stupid risks and unleash his inner demons, so I opted to just let
him play with his own ideas about beauty, obsession, and possession.

Going in from the contemporary novel and my
comic book artist character, I only knew that:

The superhero named Scratch was an incubus
… traditionally a sex demon who seduces and corrupts the
innocent, but in this case he was an ambiguous antihero.

The protagonist/sidekick character was
human and had intense body shame and anxiety.

The villain was a puritanical figure called
the Judge who wielded a gavel the size of a sledgehammer.

The setting was urban, likely New York and
involved some kind of supernatural mystery.

I wanted my incubus to be driven by something
other than "wanna date?" attraction, I figured my main character
Isaac needed to be as unlikely an object of desire as possible and
that the story would be about him falling for Scratch and becoming
his mortal sidekick and lover. Because this was a "comic book"
narrative, I wanted a sexy origin story that introduced our magical
superhero and his nemesis, as well as a larger mystery to be solved.
Because
Horn Gate was a novella, I had to get a lot of
worldbuilding covered quickly; I made Isaac a librarian in a rare
book room who'd have facts about demonology at his fingertips.

Since I was writing about an incubus I figured
it would get super-kinky and juicy pronto…most demon romances waste
no time getting kink-tastic. Nope. It felt more interesting to look
at how a creature who feeds on desire could connect with a human.
The book is definitely erotic and obsessive, but not really about
horns and humping. To help me cut to the chase, the novella opened
with Isaac finding Scratch imprisoned at an exclusive sex lounge;
some kind of biff-pow comic-bookish rescue seemed likely to ensue
and maybe an infernal gangbang. Not even close. Writing as my
Bad Idea hero I found out he was more Neil Gaiman than Zalman King so
the
Horn Gate characters inhabited this intense, obsessive,
gothic world of magic and skullduggery. What had begun a goofy lark
started feeling like an entire ominous world of its own.

Scratch became a gorgeous predator who lives on
touch. To maximize the contrast between the lovers, Isaac turned
into a chunky librarian with terrible skin, contact phobia, and
hideous self-esteem. His fictional creator in Bad Idea wrestles with
body image and social pressure, so these details mirrored a lot of
anxieties in that book as well. Likewise, because
Bad Idea's protagonist feels
conflicted about being Jewish, I decided that my demonology would be
rooted in Kabbalah.
One
of the oldest synagogues in the country is on the Lower East Side on
Eldridge Street…so I decided to situate my imaginary rare library
nearby.

This is when things got spooky. To emphasize
the cultural imprint, I gave the "sex lounge" an old Hebrew name for
hell (Gehenna) which translates as the "Great Pit" and when I went
looking for a likely location in the tenements of old Manhattan, I
discovered Pitt Street. At the intersection of Pitt and Grand is an
odd dogleg alley where a speakeasy had been hidden in the 1920s.
Even weirder, as I wrote the story I realized I was pouring in all
this authentic material I know about medieval demonology and
Gematria from university so that
Horn Gate really would be a kind of spooky, seductive mystery
(or as my husband says, "Scooby Doo with Boners").

Writing in the persona of my conflicted
Bad Idea hero, I embedded odd
esoteric puzzles that invoked real investigation in the service of
Isaac's
infatuation.
Isaac was too bookish to be a punch-and-grapple sidekick so his
adventure became a kind of "DaVinci Code" codebreaking that
channeled his obsession with Scratch into the pages of an occult
labyrinth only he could solve. I'm a stickler for details, so I
traced Isaac's path backward from sex club to library: Pitt to Grand
to Orchard to Division. The corner of Grand and Pitt was perfect for
a hellish nightspot called Gehenna. The corner where Division met
Orchard called to mind the angel standing at the gates of Eden so it
became the location of the library where Isaac leaves his innocence
behind. :P The streets of New York conspired to help me!

With Scratch, I didn't want to just plop in a
dumb horns-and-pointy-tail demon so I also reinvented the idea of an
incubus; this beast didn't just squirt or drain jizz from the
unwary, but rather that he devours touch and attention….and his
powers transform his lovers in beautiful, scary ways. As he feeds,
he ingests fear, pain, and grief in ways that wreak spectacular
havoc on the victim's body to reveal their true natures. All kinds
of cool discoveries about physical phobias and desire appeared and
resonated deeply with the characters in Bad Idea as well. Incubi are often identified as
personified wet dreams (yes, really!) corrupting humans with lust.
Another name for an incubus is a "nightmare" because they carry the
sleeper away and can't be reined in.

As for the
Horn Gate itself, the object (and thence the title) came
from in Homer's Odyssey. In book 19, Penelope explains to her
(unrecognized) husband that dreams pass through one of two gates: a
Gate of Ivory which allows false hope and delusions into the mortal
world and a Gate of Horn which releases all prophecy and
inspiration. These two opposed dream gates recur as symbols used by
a whole passel of writers: Plato, Virgil, Spenser, Pope, Eliot,
Auden, etc. And oddly enough, Kabbalistic tradition describes the
"mouth of the great abyss" as a portal through which spirits pass
when they have no power. Scratch's intentions were so cryptic that
he needed to seem both like a true savior or a complete fraud. I
really loved the idea that Isaac had to make an impossible choice
based on instinct rather than logic (which mirrored a plotline in
Bad Idea as well).

The question is Horn or Ivory: how do you know
when your true destiny shows up?

Since Scratch was my comic's superhero
and an incubus exists as a kind of seductive dream, I felt that what
Isaac offered him was a way to reopen the Horn Gate into a magical
realm that had been walled off. Likewise, since the villain was this
puritanical Judge who clamped down on tenderness, eroticism, and
fantasy, he wielded a massive ivory hammer in an attempt to stop
true dreams from sneaking into the world. From there, my book
essentially plotted itself…and several other novellas besides. By
the time I'd finished, it felt as if the Gehenna sex lounge really
existed under Pitt Street and that the Division Street Library
housed a forbidden tomes with unholy powers.

Summoning Scratch has been a wonderful kick in
the ass, adding unbelievable depth to the contemporary novels about
his fictitious creators. When the time came for my brilliant friend
Rey Arzeno to paint the cover
art for
Horn Gate, he was so taken by the world it inhabited
that he immediately proposed drawing the comic AS a comic once we
had some time. I'd love to make that happen, and he seems pretty
adamant. Who knows what we'll conjure up? :)

More significantly, building the world of
Horn Gate unearthed a host of themes in
Bad Idea; hidden strands I'd
never noticed suddenly floated to the surface. Essentially, I wrote
this novella in character AS the comic-book protagonist of
Bad Idea, which has opened up
an entire world that I can't wait to explore further in the further
adventures of Scratch.